Houston is a hotbed for romance writers

Jared’s eyes flashed in the sun like green agate as he turned toward her. He lifted one arm in greeting. A ripple of muscle danced. She touched her hair, remembering how gently he had braided it yesternight. Her scalp had tingled with pleasure at his careful ministration. — from Defiant, by Jessica Trapp

She has long auburn hair, a lovely face and a nearly life-size chess set in her backyard.

She’s partial to flowy, feminine dresses and takes time to daydream and people-watch. She met her husband when she was 13 and married him at 17. She believes that love conquers all.

Jessica Trapp is not a heroine in a romance novel. She’s a writer of romance novels, a licensed pharmacist whose fourth medieval romance, Defiant, was published last month by Zebra Books.

“I really like marriages of inconvenience,” says Trapp, 41, over a cup of hot tea in her League City home. “In historical romances, a man and woman are stuck together, married, even though they don’t know each other. I like the play between hero and heroine trying to figure out how life is going to work.”

Writers need support and encouragement, says Trapp, who organized a writing group that meets four days a week at a local Starbucks. They all work independently, but the camaraderie makes for a positive environment.

Being a romance writer, Trapp admits, has its humorous moments. Her third book — The Pleasures of Sin – is “an embarrassing title for family reunions,” she says with a giggle.

For Trapp, the Middle Ages (A.D. 476-1485) offer compelling constraints for heroines. “Women weren’t allowed to own property,” she explains, “but women have always been smart and ambitious. In medieval times, women ran castles and played a big role in society. The men were often at war.”

The Lady Gwyneth of Windrose, beyond being blessed with sun-kissed hair and alabaster skin, is just that sort of industrious woman. Defiant‘s heroine makes and sells embroidery to earn enough money to rescue women who’ve been imprisoned wrongly. The tall, wide-shouldered Jared St. John also knows a thing or two about wrongful imprisonment. When Lady Gwyneth abducts and marries him in hopes of securing her own liberty, she soon discovers that freedom isn’t the only thing she craves …

Nick de la Torre/Chronicle

Allison Kelley, executive director of Romance Writers of America, poses with unpublished manuscripts that have been submitted for RWA’s annual Golden Heart Awards.

A career in romance

In real life, matters of the heart can be upsetting and unresolved. So when we curl up with a romance, we want satisfaction.

Romantic fiction, a $1.4 billion industry, guarantees two things. The plot will follow two people on the way to a committed relationship — swingers looking for brief encounters need not apply. Second, and most important, the story will have a happy ending.

Context keeps the formula interesting. Readers are free to pluck from a dizzying buffet of subgenres, from Harlequin’s NASCAR series — “steamy drivers on the track of love” — to same-sex stories and Regency-era historicals.

Romance fiction claimed the largest share of the consumer book market in 2009, more than religious or inspirational books, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, or classic literary fiction. Even people who don’t read romance novels — or don’t admit to reading them — know the big names: Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz, Julie Garwood, Linda Howard. These are the names that dominate the romance section of your local bookstore, drugstore, supermarket and likely the shelves of your rented beach house.

Why do people keep reading romances if they know how they’re going to end?

“As with any form of entertainment, reading romance is a way to escape,” says Allison Kelley, executive director of Romance Writers of America, a national nonprofit based in Houston. “And, yes, romance novels have sex, because if there is no sexual attraction, there is no romance. Beyond that, a story can be extremely sweet or extremely sensual.”

Thirty years ago, a group of writers met in Houston and vowed to expand their careers as romance writers. That group became Romance Writers of America, which held the first romance writers conference in The Woodlands in 1981. Today, the nonprofit boasts 10,000 members and the annual conference draws more than 2,000 attendees. Dues are just $85 a year.

“It’s a business organization, not a reading club,” says Kelley, from her office in a spacious complex that might be mistaken for a dentist’s office if it weren’t for the shelves of mass-market paperbacks with racy covers and a “vault” stacked floor-to-ceiling with unpublished manuscripts. “We’re good at teaching new writers the business of romance writing.”

Multiple chapters of RWA have shot up across the country; the Houston area has three. Writers meet monthly to discuss manuscripts and talk shop about agents and publishers.

From September through December, books and manuscripts pour into the Houston headquarters while staff scrambles to organize entries for the group’s annual writing contests: the RITA Awards go to the best published romances, and the Golden Heart Awards for unpublished works. For unpublished authors, a win could mean that their manuscript catches the interest of an agent or publisher. This year’s finalists will be announced on March 25.

“Romance Writers of America has done a lot to advance the legitimacy of romance,” Kelley says. “The contests drive the quality up.”

Romance writers know they’ll need to write at least two books a year, maybe three, to make a living. Although there’s no real ladder in the business — a writer might be paid six figures for a debut novel that might become a runaway best-seller — writers should expect about $10,000 for a first book.

To survive, romance writers need the same pluck and passion as their heroines.

Courtesy photo

Lorraine Heath, who also writes under the names Rachel Hawthorne and Jade Parker.

Vital and relevant

They sat for what seemed like forever, the only motion his slow stroking of her face. They were enclosed in shadows, only a hint of distant light to outline their silhouette, and yet she could feel the intensity of his gaze — as though he were striving to understand every aspect of her, as though nothing mattered more than this moment between them. — from Passions of a Wicked Earl, by Lorraine Heath

She tends to lose count of the numbers.

Her 27th book as Lorraine Heath was released in December. (Heath is a pen name and the name she prefers for interviews.) But as Rachel Hawthorne, she has racked up 20 young adult titles, in addition to the books she has written as Jade Parker and a series she’s doing with her son.

“I usually write with thunderstorms in the background,” says Heath, 57, who works from her home in Plano. “I have a CD with rolls of thunder and rain.”

Heath writes two or three romances every year, except for the year she wrote seven. That was crazy. Crazier still, she didn’t grow up a romance fan.

In 1990, headed off on a business trip, she bought Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer. “I was halfway finished and I thought, ‘This is a romance!’ but I wasn’t sure,” Heath says. “When I got home I went to a bookstore and discovered that it WAS a romance, and I was hooked.”

Heath, who grew up in Angleton, set her first 10 romances in Texas. When her publisher, Avon, a HarperCollins inprint, told her the appetite for Texas-set historicals had stagnated, she moved the plots to England. No problem for the daughter of a British beauty queen and a Texan.

“This is a business,” Heath says. “Writers are dreamers but the publishers are realists, and they’re going to keep you going in the direction you need to go. It’s about being able to keep yourself vital and relevant.”

She was drawn to the Victorian period for its length and diversity. “At the beginning you have the Dickens era, a darker period,” Heath says. “But if you want something not as dark, you can go to the 1880s and 1890s.”

This was the age of Henry James, when an American woman looking to improve her social status might sail off to England to marry a lord. Once English estates stopped producing money, the nobility needed to marry heiresses, so this was an arrangement that suited everyone.

“Romance readers are extremely knowledgeable,” Heath says, with a don’t-I-know-it tone in her voice. “If you get a fact wrong, they’ll call you on it. They read a lot.”

She describes her books as “sensual,” a judgment supported by the cover of her latest, Passions of a Wicked Earl. It shows a shirtless man — presumably Morgan Lyons, the eighth Earl of Westcliffe — standing behind a magnificent blonde who could only be his estranged wife, Claire. His left arm grips her just below her bust, while his right arm is poised to yank down the sleeve of her long, cream-colored dress.

It’s the first story in a trilogy about three brothers, each of whom has a reputation for being a great lover. These masters of seduction indulge in all the carnal pleasure they can until each meets the one bewitching woman who will tame him …

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Kerrelyn Sparks, whose 10th paranormal, Vampire Mine, will be published in March, poses in her home office in Katy.

Don’t give up on love

He noticed for the first time how red and puffy her eyes were. She’d been crying. A lot. He gritted his teeth, once again fighting for control. The beast inside him howled, wanting to possess her and take her by force if necessary, but the human part of him loved her. — from Eat Prey Love, by Kerrelyn Sparks

Her debut was bittersweet.

For Love or Country was set in Boston during the Revolutionary War. Sales were OK, but the publisher didn’t print many copies. Kerrelyn Sparks, who lives in Katy, had yet to learn that publishers only want historicals set in the British Isles.

“My editor was brand new,” Sparks recalls, “and she quit before the book got published. I was what they call ‘orphaned,’ which happens pretty often. Then you’re shuffled off to someone who has no interest in your books.”

That was 2002. Her publisher dropped her. Her agent dropped her. “It seemed like my career was over,” Sparks, 55, says.

But she didn’t give up on romance.

“I like writing about the process of falling in love, when everything seems magical,” Sparks says. “Twenty years down the road, you tend to forget this stuff. These books remind you of the magic you once felt. They’re very healthy that way.”

People said she should try Regency romances, set from the 1790s to the 1830s, but it wasn’t for her. “My idea of a hero isn’t an earl or a duke that had been born to the title,” Sparks says. “My idea of a hero was a self-made man.”

Around the time she found a new agent, Sparks realized she needed to reinvent herself.

“As paranormal romance started to become more popular, I thought, ‘This is great fun,’ ” she says.

She wrote three chapters of a vampire story and her agent sent them off. Within a week, a handful of publishers were fighting over it. Avon nabbed it and gave her a two-book deal. She rushed to turn those chapters into How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire.

“It’s been a joyride ever since,” says Sparks, whose 10th paranormal, Vampire Mine, will be published in March.

“With vampires, I still have historical heroes,” she says. “Some of them are 500 years old. I get to stick them in a modern world with a modern heroine, and that’s where it really gets fun.”

And funny.

“Falling in love is funny,” Sparks says. “It’s the whole Mars and Venus thing. Men and women, they just bumble along. A lot of the time it does seem like men are clueless. And if a man is 500 years old and still clueless, well, that’s funny, too.”

Carlos, the hero of Eat Prey Love, is not a vampire. He’s a werepanther from Brazil on the prowl for a mate, a creature like him who’ll help care for the orphans he has come to love. When the beautiful but mortal Caitlyn first spies this graceful, exotic being, a strangled whimper escapes from her throat. Now, this is the werepanther for her …